Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8622661" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That's fair. Perhaps it is just the desire for a name for a thing that feels so cohesive to me, rather than a pick-and-choose union of disparate things.Mostly it was this explicit callout that made me think this: "I think OC RPG emerges during the 3.x era (2000-2008), probably with the growth of Living Greyhawk Core Adventures and the apparatus of 'organised play' and online play with strangers more generally." These cultures of play are rather clearly tied to either editions of D&D or --2000 was the first year of 3e, 2008 its "last." That ties the origin of this style rather closely to 3e. The fact that the author also mentioned Critical Role and things like it, which took root in a hybrid concept of both PF (e.g. the presence of Sarenrae) and 4e (most of the rest of the pantheon) further reinforced to me that these things were tied to 3e. With 5e then being called out as neo-trad in nature, when it's got a crapload of design choices I would never be comfortable with, it seemed that "neo-trad" was pretty far from what I go for.There's the further references to the "Tyranny of Fun" criticism of neo-trad. Following the link from that article to a Reddit post on the subject, I found myself at least somewhat agreeing with what that person said. (I disagree that what they call "play" and "game" are totally incompatible, I just think they need to be layered carefully.) Prioritizing "fun" exclusively is, as far as I see it, essentially saying you don't actually want rules at all, hence why I have never really understood folks who seem to see rules as a yucky distraction, a dubiously-necessary evil restricting their freedom. It also, in part, relates to other thoughts of mine.As I've mentioned in various places, I find "just make sure the players have fun!" a really unhelpful concept, one that might even detract from actually producing good experiences. It's like telling a person to "just be happy!" Trying to pursue happiness directly is often ineffective, but if you instead dedicate yourself to something engaging and worthwhile, happiness will often arise without conscious effort. That doesn't mean that thinking about happiness or fun is bad, nor that we should somehow try to "remove" happiness or fun in order to make it easier for it to spontaneously condense out of the aether--it's still work to make these things happen. It's just not work that arises from focusing on the target in question.Perhaps so. I really do love running Dungeon World, though as a player I find its systems too thin for my taste without some pretty heavy lifting on the DM's part. That is, as I once complained to a friend: prior to my DM and I working out some new stuff, it was completely possible for me to construct a generic flowchart that would apply to essentially all combats, regardless of the narrative going on. I find that dull as a gameplay exercise. The roleplay aspect was great, that DM was quite good in that regard (in particular, I can recall a fight inside a demonic flesh-tower bursting upward from within the earth, where we had to defeat opponents and avoid the grotesque organic machinery), but the gameplay aspect felt painfully thin (99% of the time I would just cast Sword on the nearest opponent, unless a particular enemy had to be stopped, or an ally needed healing).That's fair. For my part, I feel pretty strongly that the goals and purposes of D&D are already easy to identify, just based on the kind of game it is (a cooperative roleplaying game) and the things it claims to offer (fantasy, adventure, teamwork, cool stories, conflict, skillful play, the three pillars, etc.) If you're of the opinion that it's still a major open question what kind of game D&D is--or if you're looking at this in a broader sense, considering whatever potential games people might want to design--then yes, doing a wide survey is wise. Much like reading lots of books or listening to lots of different composers and music styles and analyzing what these folks have done and trying to determine why.</blockquote>

Verification